The field of the invention is clothing, and, more specifically, a portable device for allowing a person to quickly preview how clothing items will look on him or her without having to put on the clothing items.
When shopping at a clothing store, a person will often try on many different clothing items before finding one that looks good on him. This process often involves time-consuming trips to the fitting room in which the person puts on different clothing items and stands in front of a mirror to see how the clothing items look on him. In addition, this process can be time consuming for store employees who often have to reshelve or re-hang clothing items left in the fitting room by a person who decided he does not want them. Furthermore, trying on articles of clothing does not allow the person to see how they will look with clothing items in his existing wardrobe at home. This can be especially troublesome if the person is shopping for clothing items to match or coordinate with clothing items in his existing wardrobe at home.
The present invention provides for a wardrobe previewing system that allows a person to quickly preview how clothing items will look on her without having to put on the clothing items. The system also allows the person to preview how clothing items at the store will look with clothing items in her existing wardrobe at home.
In one embodiment of the invention, the wardrobe previewing system includes a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) with wireless Internet capability, clothing tags for identifying clothing items at the store, and a remote database for storing clothing item images. The PDA preferably includes a scanner capable of reading the clothing tags, a display, and application software for enabling the PDA to display a preview of clothing items on the person. In addition, a predefined image of the person is stored in the PDA""s memory. In a preferred embodiment, each clothing manufacturer will associate the image of the clothing item for a predefined pose. Accordingly, by having the person capture and store an image of the person in the predefined pose, the overlay of the clothing items will fit better over the image of the person. It is understood in the art that advanced software programming could be utilized to allow for the clothing image to automatically be sized and proportioned to fit better over the predefined image of the person.
At the store, the person scans the clothing tag of a potential clothing item with the scanner. The PDA application software then transmits the identification of the scanned clothing item from the PDA to the database via a wireless Internet link. The database retrieves a clothing item image corresponding to the scanned clothing item, and transmits the retrieved clothing item image to the PDA. The PDA application software overlays the retrieved clothing item image onto the image of the person stored in its memory to produce a composite image. The PDA application software then displays the composite image on the display to give the person a preview of how the clothing item will look on her.
To preview how a clothing item at the store will look with a clothing item in her existing wardrobe, the person simply scans and saves the clothing images of her various clothing items in her existing wardrobe into the PDA memory. This enables the PDA application software to produce a composite image of the clothing item in the store and the clothing item in the person""s existing wardrobe overlaid onto the image of the person.
In another embodiment of the present invention, the image of the clothing item is embedded in the clothing tag itself. In this embodiment, the image of the clothing item is compressed and encoded as a pattern of dots or stripes, such as bar coding, on the clothing tag. The scanner reads the pattern of dots or stripes from the clothing tag. The PDA application software then uses an algorithm that decompresses and decodes the pattern of dots or stripes to construct an image of the clothing item. This eliminates the need of having to retrieve the clothing item image from a database.